CALIBRATE

We’re now two months into CALIBRATE, a huge 600 person-month development project coordinated by the European Schoolnet. It has 17 partners in different EU countries, and we’re coordinating work package 3, where we have 24 months and 92 person-months to build a Toolbox for “collaborative authoring, searching, browsing and using learning material”. The Toolbox will be able to do searches from a custom federated search engine that has access to several EU countries’ national learning material repositories, in addition to being able to search from other Toolboxes in the network, and from open content repositories. It should allows teachers (or anyone) to create and publish learning material, search for content and tools, combine and improve them into new material.

The Toolbox will be built on top of Plone, and it will be free and open source. Anyone can join and contribute if they wish. Our work package has partners from Estonia, Finland, Hungary, and Norway and there’s about 12 people actively participating in the project, though all of them only part-time. As a development tool we’re using Trac, which is an open-source development platform that integrates a wiki, a ticket system and a version control system into one browsable, interlinked web interface. You can take a look at our project’s Trac site at http://lemill.org/trac/.

When browsing our Trac, you’ll notice that everything is done completely visibly. All meeting minutes are there, all discussions about concepts and features are there. Every patch commited into the version control system (subversion, btw) is connected to a defect or enhancement ticket, which in turn is connected to a user story ticket. So the reason for everything that we do can be tracked down. Our team also has a mailing list, where Trac automatically sends all ticket changes, and Subversion sends all commit diffs.

The project has just started two months ago and we just started producing code two weeks ago, so there’s not much of a product yet, but the first working prototype needs to be done by the end of January 2006.

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